You can call it a cult but it’s several thousand skilled workers who know what they’re doing, by and large, most of whom have a PhD and know how science and statistics work. Benchmarks are incredibly hard, and any PR or comms department at any company is going to obviously want to make things as rosy as possible, but beneath this are earnest, expensive efforts to get good quality measurements. The better you can do this the better you can compete. If you want to make a modeling decision you run an ablation, and the quality of that decision is only as good as your measurements.

The cult in this case is TESCREAL, not everyone working on AI. Last I checked not all the "several thousand skilled workers" in AI subscribe to TESCREAL ideology, although it has been a while since I've been to the Bay. Maybe things have changed since my time at Berkeley, and Dario's belief that he will eventually be made immortal by mind uploading is more widespread.

Otherwise we agree that benchmarking is hard, the benchmarks contain hard problems, and that there are many hard working people trying to accurately gauge what is going on. It is getting harder to watch though as all that is on the line taints the overall endeavor.